BlueMoon Solutions

Why Does My Keyboard Keep Changing?

Ever since Windows 8, we have have been able to select the lanaguge that we would like our computers and laptops to display. Before that, in order to legally change the language of your Windows computer it was necessary to reinstall the operating system with a version of the language that you wanted.

Since the introduction of Windows 8, it has been possible to download a ‘language pack’ for your required language. At first this process was quite buggy and took some time but over the years Microsoft have refined it and now it’s reasonably simple to change the language of Windows. So if you have a laptop in Spanish, for example, and you want to see the Windows components in your native English language, you can just head off to the settings, click on ‘time & language’ and then ‘region & language’ and from there you can ‘add a languge’. In fact you can add as many languages as you want! So if you want (for whatever reason) to swap between English and Spanish this is exactly where you would install the two languages.

One thing that does seem to trip people up in terms of languages, is the use of keyboard layouts. It’s perfectly possible that some of you have bought Spanish computers that have come with a Spanish keyboard, but you want the language of the computer to be English but you want the keyboard to remain Spanish. Remember that if you change the layout of the keyboard to also be English (like the language displayed on the computer) then the keys on the keyboard will not nesessarily show the letter that you’re expecting when you press the key – for example the ñ key on a Spanish keyboard is on the same key that the colon and semicolon is on an English keybard; therefore for this reason its well worth having the correct keyboard layout selected for your computer. The thing is that when Microsoft roll out one of the (seemingly many nowadays) large updates, they tend to set the keyboard language (and some other things) back to their defaults. So it may happen that one day you wake up following a large Windows update to find your keyboard back to Spanish where before it was in English – very frustrating of course.

Thankfully it’s something that can be easily changed. You just need to get your head around the fact that you can have a display language (the language that you see on the screen) and a keyboard layout (the language that your keyboard is set to) as being different (i.e. English display language and Spanish keyboard layout). In order to achieve this, just visit the Windows settings again (using the same instructions as earlier in this article) and underneath ‘add a language’ you will see a list of the display languages currently installed, clicking on the installed lanugage will show an ‘options’ button, which when selected will display the option to add or remove keyboard layouts. Use this function to set your preferred keyboard layout. If you select to have multiple keyboard layouts (some people prefer to have English and Spanish so that they can switch between them), then a language switcher icon will appear at the bottom of the screen allowing you to select the keyboard layout that you want for any particular task.